Summary
This is the first public quarterly report of Nurseryz.io's Northern Uganda agroforestry programmes. It covers the period January-March 2026 across 14 districts in the Lango, Acholi and West Nile sub-regions. The data behind every number in this report is queryable in real time on the funder dashboards — what we publish here is a frozen snapshot for citation and audit purposes.
Methodology
Every number in this report is computable from three primary data sources: (1) distribution records created at point of seedling handover, (2) field visit records capturing GPS, photo and survival count, and (3) inbound SMS replies parsed by the Nurseryz.io advisory bot. All three feed into a single materialised view per programme called distributions.latest_survival_* which the dashboards read live.
How we compute "survival rate"
We publish two survival numbers, deliberately:
- Overall survival (
surviving / distributed) — the conservative funder number. What fraction of every seedling I funded is confirmed alive. - Survey coverage (
reported / distributed) — what fraction of seedlings have actually been surveyed at all. This is the qualifier that prevents "97% of 5%" claims.
Most agroforestry impact reports publish only the optimistic "of-the-surveyed" number. That's how a programme with 97% survival on the 50 farmers we checked, out of 5,000 distributed, gets reported as "97% survival" in the donor PDF. Nurseryz.io refuses to do that — coverage is surfaced everywhere alongside survival.
Survival by district
14 districts, ordered by reported survival rate. Districts in red (under 50%) are flagged for field-officer intervention; districts in green (90%+) are eligible for Gold Standard carbon verification.
| District | Distributed | Surviving | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gulu | 14,200 | 13,348 | 94% |
| Oyam | 9,400 | 8,648 | 92% |
| Lira | 12,100 | 11,011 | 91% |
| Aboke | 7,800 | 7,020 | 90% |
| Kitgum | 10,500 | 9,240 | 88% |
| Apac | 8,600 | 7,396 | 86% |
| Pader | 9,800 | 7,448 | 76% |
| Agago | 7,200 | 4,464 | 62% |
| Lamwo | 5,800 | 2,610 | 45% |
Ghost-flag prevalence
Over the quarter, the ghost-farmer detector raised 37 flags across the cohort. Breakdown by rule type:
- 14 duplicate-phone flags — same phone on ≥3 distributions. Most resolved as legitimate (cooperative enrolment) or data-entry error.
- 11 uncontacted->60-days flags — distributions with no survival report after 60 days. Triggered field-officer dispatch.
- 7 suspicious-concentration flags — 3+ distributions per farmer in the same programme. Six legitimate (poly-crop households), one duplicate enrolment removed.
- 3 calendar-anomaly flags — distributions outside the programme window. All corrected (date-format errors).
- 2 duplicate-NID flags — critical severity. One legitimate cross-programme enrolment, one duplicate beneficiary record merged.
Aggregate false-positive rate (rule fired but data is legitimate): 68%. That's by design — we'd rather over-flag and let humans triage than under-flag and miss fraud. Read the methodology note on how the rules and gates are calibrated.
Cost per tree
The economic case for automated advisory at scale. Per-tree cost breakdown over the 3-month observation window, fully loaded:
| Cost component | Per tree (UGX) | % of total |
|---|---|---|
| Seedling production | 450 | 42% |
| Distribution logistics | 280 | 26% |
| SMS advisory (12 messages) | 420 | 39% |
| QR + slip printing | 75 | 7% |
| Platform fee (per-tree) | 130 | 12% |
| Field-visit coverage | 180 | 17% |
| Total per surviving tree | 1,535 | 100% |
Per-surviving-tree, not per-distributed-tree — because we count the cost against the trees that actually live. Surviving trees in this cohort cost ~UGX 1,535 (~$0.40 USD), of which 56% is advisory + tracking infrastructure and 44% is the physical seedling pipeline.
Open data
This entire report is reproducible from the public read-only API. All aggregated numbers (with farmer-level data anonymised) are available as CSV under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license. Cite as: "Nurseryz.io, Northern Uganda Q1 2026 Survival Data, accessed [date], nurseryz.io/insights/northern-uganda-q1-2026."
The funder dashboards' Reports tab is the live equivalent of this report — every funder partner can generate a programme-specific version, signed and download-able, at any time.